You need to try harder.
How about being the dead hooker? Have you tried that one?
Actually, we are the authority. You’re drunk remember? Of course you don’t. Those of us who aren’t drinking are the ones who remember. You think you are smart and witty. You’re actually drooling all over yourself and have pissed your pants. “YeeHaw! We’re having fun now! Let’s get in the car and plow into a family of 4!”:D*
*See the smiley means it’s a joke. Ain’t it funny?
I don’t mind being around some people who don’t drink. But I’ve known some teetotalers who seem bound to try to make you feel like you’re an alcoholic for enjoying a beer or two, and those I shun. Which then convinces them they’re right, ignoring the existence of the more reasonable teetotalers I keep up with. I detect a few of such in this thread.
The person to whom you were responding didn’t say merely that it was an enhancer, period. They explained that alcohol enhanced (in the sense of exaggerated) the effect of mood, good and bad.
Saying simplistically that alcohol is a depressant doesn’t tell the half of the complex effects it has, and is unhelpful.
I don’t have an issue with people who drink rationally. There is no reason we can’t sit down and you drink beer, or whatever, and I drink diet coke. I could care less and wouldn’t even mention anything about it because I probably wouldn’t notice it. But this thread started about if you’ve ever been drunk. If we’re out at a restaurant or a bar and you deliberately get drunk, you’re on your own. I am not your designated driver. I will not back you up when you pick a fight with the bouncer. And I won’t hold your head out of the toilet while you puke your guts out. About the only thing I’d do is hide your keys so you couldn’t go out and kill someone on the road, but not for your sake, for theirs.
I have no tolerance for drunks due to my history with them, but I don’t care if you drink. It also pisses me off that people think because I don’t drink I don’t like going to parties and won’t have fun. See, I’m the guy who draws a mustache in indelible ink on you when you’ve passed out! Great fun…Oh, wait. Maybe that’s why I don’t get invited?
Wow. Why so bitter? Sounds like you need a drink to lighten up. But yeah, your generalizations are indeed funny to me, since I’ve never done an you those things while intoxicated.
Maybe you missed the part where I said my drunken father would come home and beat my mother? I can still hear her screams 40 years later. Oddly enough he never exhibited that behaviour when he wasn’t drinking.
Well I’m very sorry that your father did such horrible things, but if you’re blaming alcohol instead of your father, I still think you’re misplacing the blame. People don’t completely lose control of their actions after drinking unless they want to. And certainly not everyone becomes violent and hateful after drinking.
He chose to drink, but if there was no alcohol he wouldn’t have done what he did. I say that because he never did when he wasn’t drunk.
Drinking isn’t hypnotism. Alcohol is a drug. It affects how you think. People don’t always make rational decisions while drunk. In some people it causes them to become violent.
I never said they did.
I’ll go for title of “Youngest Drunk”. My stepdad handed me a quart, yep 32 oz Bud, when I was 10 years old, half way through it he gave me my first cigarette. As I was only about 70 lbs, I woke up with a terrible hangover. He told my Mom that would fix me so I would never drink again. Didn’t work. I swiped his bottle of whiskey 3 days later and a legend was born.
Is that how people you know behave when drunk? They pick fights, throw up and pass out? Are these people 17 years old? Some of my friends and I went to the bar last night and got drunk. I had four Jameson, and who knows what everyone else had, but for cryin’ out loud, nobody started a fight, nobody threw up, and nobody took a swing at the wait staff. I don’t think you understand what being drunk is.
There’s been some name-calling in this thread and it needs to stop. No warnings issued. Comments on the nature of one’s own drunken experiences, or non-drunken experiences as the case may be, are fine— but no more sniping.
Ellen Cherry
MPSIMS Moderator
Never been drunk, largely because I don’t drink (hard to have the one without the other 
). The closest I ever came was drinking about half of a mini-snifter’s worth of some fancy pear-infused liqueur at a fancy dinner party in grad school (over the course of about two hours); it gave me a bit of a headache.
This, actually, is the part of alcohol culture that I don’t get. Sure, alcohol makes you relaxed and disinhibited (and eventually makes you act like an idjit, even if you don’t get falling-down drunk), but why exactly is that necessary to have a good time at a party? Unless you’re so socially anxious you’d spend the entire time hiding in a corner if you couldn’t get a buzz on, I mean.
Good god, why? Beer tastes absolutely wretched.
But alcohol in and of itself has a flavor and a smell, and I don’t like it. At all. I don’t like foods made with alcohol, even, unless they’ve been cooked long enough to drive off the smell and taste.
There’s different levels of drunk. It’s not just sober to instant raging lunatic. I can have 2 or 3 Long Islands and be in a good mood for a couple of hours. I can also shoot tequila until I wake up in a strange place. It’s all about doseage. Even water can have very negative effects if you take in to much.
Can I ask why? What is it about drinking that is required to make a party enjoyable for you?
I’m getting really curious if the adamantly anti-alcohol people in this thread also only have sex for procreational purposes and ingest all of their meals in pill form.
Actually, I have an experiment to propose, for the drinkers. Next time you are at a party where people are likely to get tipsy, hang out and socialize but don’t drink any alcohol. (This replicates the conditions we non-drinkers experience at such social occasions.)
My experience is that after a group hits a certain point of alcohol intake, socializing with them becomes much less enjoyable. Conversations become more disjointed, jokes become dumber, they become more likely to flirt inappropriately (for instance, with people who aren’t interested), they get more irritated by small misunderstandings and are harder to soothe, they have a harder time picking up on each other’s nonverbal cues for comfort or interest. From their perspective they’re having a gay old time, but from a sober perspective, they’re annoying.
This happens before slurring words, difficulty walking a straight line or “wow, I feel drunk” occurs, and well before falling-down-drunk.
I’m not afraid of loosing control, but I don’t see the desirability in a drug (and it is a drug) that will make me feel good but act stupid; not “waking up next to a dead hooker” stupid but “I would find this obnoxious if I wasn’t drunk” stupid. There are many other things I can do that make me feel good that don’t make me act stupid.
Plus, as I said before, alcohol just plain tastes nasty.